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Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

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Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#111

Post by cpach »

nodata wrote: post #98
pudquick wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first comment in this discussion I've seen that is actually interesting and might provide an explanation. The Dropbox file status symbols are a -big hack-. Up until OS X 10.10, for instance, the file browsing interface didn't provide per-file badging at the OS API level. So they literally had to patch the running Finder process to do this. I wouldn't be surprised to learn something similar is going on wit…

They were patching the running Finder process? wtf?

See this blog post from 2011: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/03/22/disabling-dropboxs-haxie/

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#112

Post by a3_nm »

umurkontaci wrote: post #96
bobofettfett wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe not. Your speculation is as good as mine. Or the op. Or everyone else. The point was Dropbox is accessing files outside the folder, something I would not want or expect. "It is incredibly hard for me to believe that Dropbox has sneakily transferred >1TB" Did they transfer hashes? name+type+size for fingerprinting? Searching for credit numbers or SSNs? Who knows. I don't. And don't do evil is no longer the ba…

Simple. Put up an SSL interceptor proxy and see what's going through.

Would this really work? I would expect the SSL certificate of Dropbox's servers to be hardcoded in the client, so the client would refuse to connect to an interceptor.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#113

Post by a3_nm »

smackay wrote: post #51
mappu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL Unison? Add in encfs with a cheap storage VPS for off-site redundancy. It should run on android too if you have a normal-looking chroot installed.

Unison was the first thing I tried after moving away from DropBox. The main problem I had with it was that both machines involved in the syncing had to be running which made moving from laptop to desktop not as seamless as I would have liked. Still the syncing process was flawless. I had better results using Seafile, http://seafile.com/en/home/ , their free account was sufficient for my needs and worked great. You ca…

In Seafile the server doesn't notify changes to clients, instead the clients poll every 30 seconds, which means that changes are synced with a 30 second delay (and presumably bandwidth is wasted). See https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/992. I'm not a fan of Dropbox but at least the lag is only a few seconds, which I think is because the clients notice changes with inotify and send them to the server, and the server probably pushes updates to the clients.

I haven't tried to use it seriously, but seeing that it doesn't do this right discourages me a bit from testing it further.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#114

Post by kowdermeister »

zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

They use end to end encryption: http://tresorit.com

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#115

Post by huhtenberg »

tallanvor wrote: post #91

In Windows, even with a filter limiting which directories to process, a FileSystemWatcher object has to examine each event and decide whether or not to call the event handler or let it pass without action. That means it would have to read the file information and compare it against the filters that have been defined. These actions will show up as at least 4 or 5 entries in Process Monitor (and maybe more, I'm not sur…

> FileSystemWatcher

That's a .Net contraption over one of two Win32 APIs that provide file system monitoring services. Neither of these requires opening files in response to file system notifications. That's 100%, guaranteed.

Correct me if I wrong but Dropbox is not written in .Net, so what you said is irrelevant.

  --
APIs in question:

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#116

Post by a3_nm »

moe wrote: post #75
Already__Taken wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll have that problem with anything you don't run yourself so that seems like an unfair complaint. Can't this sync desktop server and laptop server?

I ran unison for a while but the conflict resolution was unfortunately lacking. It repeatedly stopped sync'ing properly until I intervened manually. A few months ago I switched to csync[1], which looks better so far. [1] https://www.csync.org/

The last csync release is from August 2013. Is the project still alive?

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#117

Post by atmosx »

umurkontaci wrote: post #95
tomp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This explains the first part (Dropbox accessing the files), but not the second part (synchronous network activity).

Dropbox is always connected and continually checks for updates, just because one sees at the same time doesn't mean they are related. I see Dropbox connections all the time whenever I look through my network.

I am on mac, I have littlesnitch and I also have Geektool display network connections. Dropbox is not always "active". I don't see any kind of network traffic after syncing has been done under macosx.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#118

Post by agopaul »

cevn wrote: post #34
agopaul wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say solid, but I don't see any proof that the client actually send the file. Without something like a strace analysis, you can't really know for sure if the file was even read completely and sent to the Dropbox servers

I really, really doubt that the client actually sends the file. But, imagine if they read only metadata and uploaded that. I agree with what another commented brought up - it's probably just unfortunately overaggressive 'filesystem-watch' code - IE when you change a file it checks to see if it needs to be synced and re-uploaded. It shouldn't be able to affect other files, though. Makes me wish we had more nuanced sec…

I thought the same thing: maybe eventually desktop OSes will have some sort of permission control like on mobile

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#119

Post by aram »

mahouse wrote: post #107
aram wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - why is this downvoted?

I can't downvote anything, but I can only guess it's being downvoted for being propaganda.

Propaganda of what exactly? That we shouldn't trust proprietary software?

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#120

Post by mrpopo »

pudquick wrote: post #66
gnud wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some more information: Dropbox does not read the file outside the dropbox folder. It does, however, 'QueryBasicFileInformation' and and 'QueryDirectory' when I create a file on my desktop. I'm guessing this has to do with the explorer extension.

This is the first comment in this discussion I've seen that is actually interesting and might provide an explanation. The Dropbox file status symbols are a -big hack-. Up until OS X 10.10, for instance, the file browsing interface didn't provide per-file badging at the OS API level. So they literally had to patch the running Finder process to do this. I wouldn't be surprised to learn something similar is going on wit…

I know my company has had many problems that were pinned down to Dropbox hooking some Win32 API functions that we use. I am not familiar with the semantics of hooking, but could it be related to that?
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